Ralph Kirkpatrick, in full Ralph Leonard Kirkpatrick (born June 10, 1911, Leominster, Mass., U.S.—died April 13, 1984, Guilford, Conn.), American musicologist and one of the most influential harpsichordists of the 20th century.

Kirkpatrick studied piano from age six and began to play harpsichord in 1930. He graduated from Harvard University in 1931 and then went to Paris to continue his studies. His teachers included Wanda Landowska, the French conductor and teacher Nadia Boulanger, and the British early-music specialist Arnold Dolmetsch. Kirkpatrick taught at Yale University from 1940 until 1976. He was especially known for his performances of the harpsichord music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti, but he also performed on the clavichord and—particularly the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—on the early pianoforte. His main scholarly achievements were his exhaustive biography, Domenico Scarlatti (1953), and an 18-volume facsimile edition of Scarlatti’s complete keyboard sonatas (1971), with each work chronologically organized by Kirkpatrick number.

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keyboard musical instrument in which strings are set in vibration by plucking. It was one of the most important keyboard instruments in European music from the 16th through the first half of the 18th century.